Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

In a sense, I may not consciously know what I'm doing. I feel that I'm telling a story. I'm a kind of medium by which something is transmitted.

A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.

No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.

I am not conscious of working especially hard, or of 'working' at all. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don't think of them as work in the usual sense of the word.

My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.

How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty?